Word: wasps
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...real-life relationship with co-star Diane Keaton, Woody Allen's latest--and arguably best--film is far more than cinema a clef. Allen's sensitive, sometimes painfully realistic portrait of a failed love affair between a neurotic but lovable New York Jew and a flaky midwestern WASP marks a generally successful departure in thematic approach: Annie Hall goes much farther in exploring human relationships than any of Allen's previous films. Still, the best moments in the film are the deliberate send-ups in which Allen unleashes his scathing wit against such deserving targets as Los Angeles...
...Cardin flew a group of journalists to Lyon, the center of the silk industry, where they viewed his new models at the modern Lyon-Satolas airport-an appropriate setting, since Cardin was one of the creators of the 1960s futuristic look. His collection this year included accordion-pleated capes, wasp-waisted gowns and bright, tiered skirts...
...does he do it? By reserve-literally, by inhibition, the mother of taste. Significantly, he entitled an early "self-portrait" of 1947-48 Homely Protestant, a phrase he picked at random from a page of Joyce. Motherwell was not the only Wasp among the New Yorkers who created abstract expressionism, but he was certainly the most conscious of his puritan background. The son of a California banker, he perceived America as a land of constraint-the abode, so to speak, of the superego. Pictorial sensuousness was something one escaped toward-across the Atlantic, to an imagined Paris, home town...
...encounter starts benignly as Alice reads a newspaper to her six-legged acquaintance. But the double-entendres soon begin. Whenever Alice encounters a creature, the reader can hear a pun drop. The wasp, for example, mistakes Alice for a bee because she has a comb. Typically, wordploy is incessant, and terror lurks just beneath the surface. At one point the wasp takes off his wig and stretches out one claw toward Alice "as if he wished to do the same for her." "The cutting off of hair," writes Gardner, "like decapitation and teeth extraction, is a familiar Freudian symbol...
Indeed they will, along with those of unaffiliated amateurs rediscovering an eminent Victorian fantasy. As the wasp clearly demonstrates, the Alice books, like Finnegans Wake, are novels in the form of dreams, granting wit to animals and game pieces, annihilating space and natural law. The Rev. Charles Dodgson considered these volumes mere entertainments. Most of the author's adult life was spent as an Oxford don, pursuing the arcana of mathematics and logic...